


sympathy for the devil

by pigeonsarecool



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, [psycho pstick this is not a song it's a sandwich voice] this is not a fic it's a coping mechanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-06 01:58:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15876132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonsarecool/pseuds/pigeonsarecool
Summary: The crux of the problem, when you get down to it, is this: he’s got a direct line to the end of the world and it’s exactly as exhilarating as he’s always imagined, only most days it makes him want to puke his fucking guts out.





	sympathy for the devil

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by this vid: https://vimeo.com/86078900

1.

One, the clock stops; two, the dust settles; three, someone’s gotta lay down some lines around here, man, says Newt, some ground rules, and they’re in Hong Kong again but uptown this time and _with time_ this time and after a brief detour (a post-apocalyptic press tour, sorry, yes, okay, post- _non_ -apocalyptic, if you want to be technically correct about it—not that it matters anyway, in the end—with Mako and Raleigh as the world’s shared face of deliverance and _them_ in the wings, matching bloodshot eyes and Newt high on the attention and Hermann white-knuckling his cane all the way down and the ghost of the Drift clinging to them both like smoke off an apartment fire) they settle into the new lab, which is huge and shiny and intricate and Hermann’s in love with it and Newt’s maybe a little less in love with it but once he gets a nice red line down the middle it starts to feel okay again, like letting out a breath, like the heady rush of a followed order, a leveled city, like pushing the button, like filling the tank, like proving the predictive model, like _home._ It doesn’t occur to either of them until after they’ve spent a week together at the bottom of the skyscraper with two dozen other scientists, smashing beakers and throwing entrails and shouting obscenities from opposite corners of the room, that Liwen had intended to put them in separate labs, with separate teams of scientists; “—There is an office for you on the fourth floor, Dr. Gottlieb,” says one of her well-dressed corporate lackeys, sometime after the sixth lab tech walks out because of an unsafe work environment or something and, yeah, okay, shithead, fine, I was the one who threw the blue, I take full responsibility, if we both get fired it’s my fault, you get to be right, for once in your life, you can take that one to your grave, are you happy? _No_ , hisses Hermann, but not out loud, and without opening his mouth Newt says, _Get out of my fucking head_.

It’s not the first time this has happened, is the worst part. Hermann’s brain, actually, is the worst part, because Newt can’t do a goddamn thing anymore without feeling it pressed up against the edges of his own consciousness, this terrible constant presence, this other-brain that fits into all the spaces where the one he was born with has broken off parts of itself, from necessity or barbarity or love. He feels, too, that Hermann understands this, and they don’t ever talk about it, the ways in which they are not whole, haven’t been since Trespasser made landfall, maybe longer than that, maybe a whole lot longer than that, if he’s being honest with himself, and, hey, let’s face it, _denial_ was never gonna be his Achilles’ heel—now, though, he’ll be gasping through his latest iteration of The Nightmare and wake to feel Hermann’s mind resting against his, not actively watching, just _there_ , more solid than the fucking Earth has been in decades, and the fact that it _calms_ him will make him want to throw himself face-first into the fucking Breach.

Or he’ll be on his own side of the lab, minding his own goddamn business and doing the job he gets paid a truly disgusting amount of money to do, and look down at his work only to find that, instead of finishing the notes for the reactor fuel experiment he’s actually been _thinking_ about, he’s written out Hermann’s all-too-familiar event predictor equation. He keeps his mouth shut about it because he’s not a complete fucking idiot, but from the deep and fervent feeling that hits him a moment later he thinks maybe Hermann already knows.

He sure as hell _hopes_ it’s Hermann, anyway, because other possibility is too pathetic to think about, even for him.

Three weeks and he’s calling Mako from one of the last landlines in the world—the latter because Hermann’s a curmudgeonly old bastard who’s got his ass stuck in a time vortex c. 2013 and the former because he hasn’t heard a word from her since his own big mouth got him and Hermann kicked out of the Corps, and he’s more ashamed of disappointing a kid who dyed a blue streak in her hair in the back of his lab every two weeks since she was thirteen years old than he is afraid of what she’ll say when she hears his voice on the receiver—“What can I do for you, Dr. Geiszler?” she says, by way of greeting, and the relief, when it hits, is enormous.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“I don’t know anyone else calling from the basement of Shao Industries headquarters.”

He whistles. “Tracing calls now, are you?”

“The new Marshall is. For my own protection.”

“Someone been threatening you?” he says, knowing the answer. No woman has ever gotten as famous as Mako now is without receiving a fair amount of public vitriol for her trouble. “‘Cause if they were, me and Hermann are more than happy to go over there and fuck ‘em up. Hermann can take a guy out with his cane in, like, 0.2 seconds, and then there’s my brilliant tactical advantage of looking like an easy target, so—”

She giggles, sounding seventeen again and huddled over jaeger blueprints with Hermann at his desk while Newt, nail-biting his way through day six of his wait for an eleven-thousand-dollar skinmite delivery, paced back and forth along the lab’s dividing line until Hermann said, without looking up, Come over here and help if it will put a stop to your infernal pacing, and Newt said, Well, for starters, you could bypass the secondary command line altogether, and Hermann said, You don’t know what you’re talking about, sit _down_.

“How’s life in the private sector?”

“Drift bleedover’s a bitch.”

“What,” she says, her voice rumbling again with barely-suppressed laughter, “trouble in paradise?”

“It’s not paradise,” he says, “when I’m sharing a lab with the same asshole they’ve been saddling me with for a goddamn decade. _Ten years_ , Mako, ten years of dealing with Hermann Gottlieb, June’ll be eleven, eleven whole years, that’s, what, a hundred and thirty-two months, that’s almost _four thousand days_ , can you believe that? And now I have to hear his _thoughts_ , too, it’s like—”

“You are a ridiculous man,” she informs him, and in the background he hears a male voice laughing.

“Hey, is that Raleigh?” he says. “Tell him to stop listening in on private conversations.”

“Raleigh,” says Mako, “Dr. Geiszler says hello, and thanks for saving the world.”

More laughter.

“ _I did that_ ,” hisses Newt, and Mako and Raleigh just laugh some more, and he’s halfway through an explanation he _really_ shouldn’t have to still be giving for two of the smartest jocks this side of the Pacific before he realizes they’ve already hung up on him.

They’d seemed so _happy_.

Newt has never envied the jaeger pilots, is the thing. He and Hermann are strange like that; in every Shatterdome he’s ever worked at, there were always at least a handful of jaeger repairmen and LOCCENT guys and administrators and even his own research assistants, back when he still had those, who wanted nothing more than to be one half of a big shiny hero suit, battling God in the middle of the ocean. Hermann, who hates pretty much everyone he’s ever met, with the possible exception of _himself_ , once said, when Newt provoked him to it, he’d rather be dead in a ditch on the side of a broken-down highway in Frankfurt than let another human being read his mind, mathematical _accuracy_ of the neural interface system nonwithstanding, and Newt—Newt’s always thought he’d only pity whatever poor bastard got stuck fighting a war from the inside of _his_ head.

So, you know. If Liwen wants them separated she can come drag Newt up to the fourth floor by the scruff of his fucking neck.

 

2.

In November, they take a break from Shao research and co-author a paper on the intersection of kaiju biology and jaeger tech, although Hermann is, predictably, a bitch about it; in the end Newt’s name comes first but only because of the alphabet, and Hermann spends—perhaps in retaliation—an absurd amount of time ragging on him about his writing style (how in God’s name do you have six doctorates and are still utterly unable to grasp the basic purpose of a semicolon?). Tendo calls the day it’s published, says, “I gotta say, I didn’t think I’d ever see those two names at the top of the same paper that wasn’t court-ordered by the Marshall,” and Newt says, “Did you even _read_ it, dude,” at the same time that Hermann says, “It’s our second joint publication, actually.”

“The fact that you guys still haven’t murdered each other in cold blood,” says Tendo, his voice rich with amusement, “continues to blow my damn mind.”

“Well,” says Newt, feeling defensive, “that was before I really _knew_ him.”

He’d forgotten about that paper—must have been over a decade ago now, just after K-Day, when he and Hermann still hadn’t met in person and therefore still liked each other,and were working for the PPDC in Shatterdomes on opposite coasts—they’d collaborated long-distance on what would come to be known as the _second-_ most influential xenobiology paper in history: it was the summer Hermann’s revolutionary Mark I jaeger code saved the world from its newest unnatural disaster and spit out disaster in its own right, these fucked-up burned-out mostly-volunteer military test subjects who all got swept under the rug and buried as soon as their bodies gave out from the radiation poisoning, and then Lightcap’s guys came in and hollowed out Hermann’s beloved jaeger code to fit two brains instead of one, which, well, that’s an interesting way to structure—

He’d sent Hermann his theory, complete with diagrams, and Hermann had replied with a letter that opened _Newton!_ , complete with exclamation point, and four months and one publication credit later they were meeting for the first time in Los Angeles, standing in the then-Marshall Fukumoto’s office giving a presentation that devolved very quickly into an unhinged screaming match, and the Marshall had written them both up for being assholes but they were _right_ , they’d been right all along, and before the day was up they were assigned to work together, as partners and as heads of their respective departments, in the Los Angeles Shatterdome.

There had been a lot of arguing, he remembers, but also a lot of writing, and thinking, and being _challenged_ by someone else’s ideas in a way Newt hadn’t really been since he was a young teenager fumbling his way through a B.S. in what felt a lot like competition with adults twice his size. For a while there, Hermann, with his merciless knife’s-edge mind and his deep and abiding love for anything he could set a pattern to, had seemed like the best thing that would ever happen to him.

Hermann says, “But this is only the second-best thing we’ll ever collaborate on,” and Newt clenches his teeth, willing away the raw, sick feeling rising in his throat. _Obviously I’ve disproved that hypothesis, asshole,_ he thinks, but he doesn’t know if Hermann hears it or not. It comes and goes, this thing of theirs, and Newt _hates_ it when its fluctuations give Hermann the last unspoken word.

He says, “I doubt it.”

 

3.

Otachi’s baby inks its way over his shoulder, her tail curling up around his neck in a bright, startling tendril of color. Hermann hates it, says it looks like a noose, says it’s deranged to love something so much that’s tried to eat you, but Newt ignores him, for the millionth time (and they must have literally had this argument a million times: _Insensitive_ , Hermann will say; _Scientific curiosity_ , Newt will say; _Notice I don’t have Breach equations tattooed on every inch of_ my _person,_ Hermann will say; _Maybe you do, I’ve never seen you so much as take your jacket off,_ Newt will say; _I can assure you this is not the case—)_

This time it’s different, because Otachi’s baby is different, and because the world isn’t ending anymore. Sometimes he forgets that it isn’t and then remembers, and it’s a shock to his system, the memory of the Drift landing on him like a slap, rippling out towards Hermann’s own consciousness and getting a brainful of negative feedback in reply.

He actually christens the baby, scrawls its new name in marker on the side of the tank holding what’s left of her, and when Hermann sees it he says, “For the love of _God_ , Newton,” which was the same thing he’d the first time Newt told him about Operation Drift-With-a-Kaiju, the night Pentecost went to Alaska to find his survivor and Newt stayed up till dawn dissecting what little of Mutavore he’d been able to get his hands on before the scavengers did and when Hermann came in at six and found him pacing the lab, manic and bloodshot and exhausted, he said, “For the love of _God_ , Newton,” in exactly that way, in the voice that Newt thinks is probably the closest thing either of them are ever going to get to affection. It’s _familiarity_ , is what it is, and God knows Hermann is alone in that, in being such a fundamentally mismatched puzzle piece that Newt Geiszler of all goddamn people has become familiar to him, that telling Newt he’s an idiot comes as easy and mindless as breathing, that _for the love of God Newton_ sounds like a normal person’s _Good morning_.

Not _entirely_ alone, of course. In the back of his mind, something dark and vast and nameless hums its approval; _oh_ , he thinks, _oh_ —

“Alice,” says Newt, “is a beautiful name for our baby,” and Hermann glares at him with a viciousness that feels more like adrenaline than anger.

He surrounds her name with chalked-in hearts, and starts bringing her up in casual conversation with Shao people from other departments, which freaks Hermann out because technically they’re not supposed to still even _have_ the brain, but Newt fudged some paperwork and paid for it to be shipped back with them and he’s pretty damn proud of how well he’s managed to keep it preserved and ostensibly functional. With the one-year mark of the not-apocalypse approaching, he tells everyone he meets that he and Hermann are celebrating Alice’s first birthday soon, until half the building’s under the impression that Alice is either their cat or their adopted child, which riles Hermann so quickly and so viscerally that Newt can’t help but take advantage of it. Getting under Hermann’s skin is by now a habit as essential to him as breathing. If it were anyone else it’d border on the ridiculous, but as things stand it’s no more ridiculous than the fact that Hermann still lets him, still rises to it, still plays the straight man to Newt’s joker every time he asks for it, steady and reliable like every other thing Hermann does.

On the one-year anniversary of the closing of the Breach, Liwen herself comes to talk to them about their work ethic (amusing) and their compatibility in the lab (hilarious), and at the end of it Hermann gets to stand by and smirk like the world’s biggest asshole while Newt gets a dressing-down in rapidfire Mandarin that Hermann is all too happy to help him translate, albeit _silently—_ because Hermann, the smug bastard, had to be the one to go and get so good at languages that by the time they hit their last Shatterdome he’d become the PPDC research division’s (read: Newt’s) unofficial translator, which meant that Newt had never actually learned more than a few words of Mandarin until they took the Shao job and Hermann said he was bloody well going to _have_ to—and then it’s _his_ turn, because Newt may have thrown highly acidic kaiju blood across the lab and it may have burned a hole in the sleeve of one of Hong Kong’s best and brightest postwar xenobiologists but it was Hermann who’d provoked him to it and Hermann who didn’t even bother to look up when it happened, just stepped neatly out of its path and kept writing busily on the chalkboard as it landed with a satisfying _splat_ —the long and short of it is that the last pair of scientists remaining under Newt and Hermann’s supervision had informed HR of their requests for transfer to another division earlier that morning.

“Just like old times,” says Newt, clapping him on the back as they listen to the click of Liwen’s heels down the hall, and Hermann scowls at him.

“I know she’s no Marshall Pentecost,” he says stiffly, “but I do wish you’d stop antagonizing her.”

“I was polite!”

“Hardly.”

“Well, I knew you weren’t really translating.” And it isn’t, Newt thinks, as though Hermann hasn’t had his fair share of uncharitable thoughts about their new employer.

“Maybe next time I _will_ ,” says Hermann—crabby, Newt knows, from being reprimanded, and for being made to stand for too long—“and then I’ll finally have a lab to myself—”

“You’d miss me.”

“I most assuredly wouldn’t.”

“I’ve been inside your head.”

“Stop,” warns Hermann, and the memory hits them both at the same time:

Once, in Anchorage, Newt and Hermann had had an argument, but not the usual loud, scrappy kind—a serious one, a mutual cold-shouldering that lasted two weeks straight. Newt wouldn’t talk to him, would barely even _look_ at him, and Hermann, exasperated, had taken to e-mailing him any necessary work-related communications, careful not to let a note of apology creep into them. Newt had, maturely, blocked his address around day three, but in the end he cracked first, not that Hermann’s counting—the last handful of other scientists in the PPDC had been laid off and he’d slouched into Hermann’s lab the morning after, obviously hungover, leaned up on the wall next to the chalkboard to get his attention and said, Can we just forget this, man? I miss working with you, I’m sorry, okay, you’re not obsolete or pedantic or whatever else I said, or, I mean, you are, but you’re, like, all I’ve got. We’re gonna be the last men standing, and I don’t wanna do it alone.

By the end of the day, Hermann’s lab had become Newt-and-Hermann’s lab, with masking tape running straight down the middle, and that night the _Gypsy_ fell to her knees in the snow off the coast of Alaska.

That was the longest they’d gone without speaking in eleven years. In Hermann’s mind, Newt is surprised to find—but at the same time, _not at all_ —this memory is a map of tenderness: the cold Alaskan morning light, Newt’s gray haggard face, an unusually troublesome leg. A long night working and reworking the same equation that always came out to the same awful answer.

(“What’ve you got for me, Dr. Gottlieb,” the Marshall would ask him, later that day, and Hermann would have to stand up very straight and dust the chalk off his coat and say, “In two days, six hours, and approximately seventeen minutes, many people are going to die, and eight days after that even more people are going to die, and this will repeat for as long as we allow it to, or until there is no one left on this Earth to kill.”)

 

4.

The Nightmare goes like this: he is vast, he is ancient, he is unfathomable, he has no name, he has one purpose.

Every coastal city he’s ever been shunted into somehow merges into one, the vast panoply of Pacific civilization spread out beneath him like a bloodstain—his ribs are half-buried in the Bone Slums of Hong Kong; his teeth are snatching up the Golden Gate like it’s made of tissue paper, and it doesn’t taste like anything at all; his mother’s body is being cleaved in two; he does not know the name of the man who predicted him; he is only following the directives coded into his body; he is being born; he is giving birth; he is responsible for the deaths of millions; he has never been in love; Hannibal Chau is grinding up his bones and selling them for gold and silver.

In Manila, there are shrines to him. In California, there are monuments. In Alaska, there’s a crumbling wall with his name on it, just not in so many words.

In Hong Kong, he reads something that he will come to know as _love_ in the brainwaves of a thing with a target burned permanently into its DNA. As he bears down on it, the thing stares up at him, and on its skin he can see his own faces, legions of them, reflected back into his own eye, and he has never seen a mirror before but he knows now and with a terrible certainty that there is no hope left, that one of them has already been devoured.

 

5.

Personally Newt thinks it’s an overreaction, being dismissed from the PPDC after having literally _saved the world_ on its payroll, but it’s also becoming increasingly clear to him that the PPDC, for all its we’re-all-in-this-together posturing, has been selling its jaeger tech to the American, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and U.K. militaries since the day the Marshall died, and that yeah, it has a vested interest in keeping the public eye _distracted_ , if not averted entirely—Herc fucked off to an undisclosed inland location with a generous military pension as soon as he could get through the red tape, and no one’s seen or heard from him since; Tendo left the PPDC after the Breach closed and went back to his old job as a 911 operator, where (Newt likes to think) he still keeps rosary beads at the wrist when he picks up the phone; Mako and Raleigh were the only survivors who stuck around long enough to see it all go to shit in real time and it looks, to Newt, like a fate worse than irrelevance, than early retirement, than selling your soul to the devil—except, well, yes, _exactly_.

He loves Mako like a niece, maybe, or a godchild, loves this girl who was born into a world already half-gutted from decades of apathy and avarice not her own, loves the woman she’s become, even as he sees her face plastered on billboards and buses and God knows what other kinds of sick jaeger-worshiper propaganda, because she’s inherited the hope her father used to carry like a torch, like a spark, like a falling axe, and she bears the weight of it so gracefully Newt watches her give a statement on Chinese cable TV every Saturday night for six months and does not think, We’ve all failed her, does not think, We failed her before she was even born, does not think, She’s not even thirty years old.

In March, Raleigh dies of radiation posioning. Newt spends the day pacing the lab and dialing Mako’s private number until Hermann tries to physically wrest the phone away from him, says she’ll call when she’s ready, says the last thing that girl needs is _you_ trying to be helpful, Newton, and of course he’s right, but after that neither of them can concentrate on work. They hadn’t been close with Raleigh, hadn’t even known him particularly well, but there’s something about being stuck in a ruined city at the end of the world with someone who shoulders along with you the burden of salvaging what’s left of it that, yeah, tends to cultivate a certain kind of fondness, or at least a grudging sense of camaraderie. “Didn’t you once drunkenly refer to him as having the intellect of an unusually humanoid sea-cucumber?” asks Hermann, but his heart isn’t in it; these radiation poisoning cases always get him in a sour, withdrawn mood, even though Newt tries to tell him it’s not his fault, that Stacker and Raleigh were casualties of the kaiju, not the jaegers, come on, man, think _logically._ Or, you know, don’t.

They go to the Shatterdome for a private memorial service a week later and it’s raining because of course it’s raining and Mako’s there, looking shockingly, wrenchingly _young_ , half-hidden under her umbrella, and it’s Hermann who folds her into his arms, says, “Oh, my dear,” as her small body heaves with sobs, her face turned into his shoulder. Newt, who’s never been great with affection, physical or otherwise, hangs back until she pulls away, sniffling, and lays a hand briefly on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, feeling horribly, guttingly inadequate. Thinking of Hermann, thinking of Anchorage, thinking of all those studies from the late ‘teens about jaeger pilots who’d lost their Drift partners and gone crazy, ended up suicided or institutionalized or ranting on street corners or worse. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” she says, and it’s not a benediction, for which he is pathetically grateful; that would have been its own kind of knife to the gut, a mortification even he isn’t disconnected from his fellow man enough to want. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your calls.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to me either,” he tells her, and she musters up a half-grin.

“No offense.”

“None taken, believe me. Hermann made me turn the phone off after, like, call number twenty.”

From the small and dwindling pool of people who knew Raleigh Becket, Tendo is the only one who’s prepared a speech. It’s short and surprisingly lovely: “Tradition has it,” he says, “that Drift partners are eulogized in pairs. Raleigh and Yancy died seven years apart,” and no one misses the way his voice catches on the last word. _Apart_. “For years, the Becket brothers were synonymous with each other. Very few of us—” His eyes flicker to Newt and Hermann, but do not rest there— “Very few of us know what it’s like to be part of a Drift, to know another person’s mind as intimately as our own. Raleigh had not one, but two Drift partners—his brother, Yancy, and his friend, Mako Mori. Those of you who’ve studied Drift technology can confirm how rare that situation is. Most people never experience true compatibility at all, and those who do only feel it once.”

Mako’s hand finds Newt’s, squeezes until it begins to hurt.

“At the public burial tomorrow, people more important than I am will talk about Raleigh’s abilities as a pilot, but I’m here to talk about his qualities as a human being. I want to say that he was kind, that he was compassionate, that he loved so deeply and so often that he was able to form a genuine, workable Drift connection twice. And yeah, he killed kaiju with it; I feel like that’s important to mention. Raleigh Becket was a man who saved the world with love. How many of us can say that?”

Not us, thinks Newt. Not us, not us, not us, not us. Not us.

Together, with Mako, they stand for a prayer.

 

6.

They don’t talk about the Nightmare except to each other, in the privacy of Hermann’s apartment (which is rapidly becoming Newt-and-Hermann’s apartment; the nightmares, they find, are easier to work around when they’re together, sharing the same physical space, the way they’ve always done in crisis. The apartment isn’t divided the way the lab is, because that would feel like a concession, though on behalf of which party Newt isn’t sure; he gets some of his old miniature anatomical models mailed in from a PPDC storage unit and arranges them on the kitchen table, and Hermann bitches about it over breakfast but doesn’t blow a fuse, so the next week Newt brings his coffee maker and favorite jacket, and Hermann just presses his lips together and sighs long-sufferingly, which makes Newt want to plaster every available surface with _Godzilla_ posters and candids of Hermann smiling; he refrains, admirably he thinks, from doing so). Some nights the dreams get so bad all bets are off; he’ll wake up disoriented and heavy with a dread that’s only half his, and instead of going out to the balcony to smoke and pace he’ll go to Hermann’s bedroom, sit down on the edge of the bed and let Hermann grab hold of his forearms, breathing quiet and uneven, not quite looking at each other’s faces, until he can feel their heartbeats slowing, their world tipping back onto its well-worn imperfect axis.

The dreams increase in frequency, length, and intensity. They hook their heads up to jerry-rigged electromagnetic scanner machines while they sleep and find their brain signatures _abnormal_ , to say the least, their pulses quicker than hummingbirds’, their blood pressure rising and falling at rates that would make any doctor worth a license start calling in the deathbed procedures. At the lab, they make drones, and test them out against simulated kaiju made from computer imaging and tiny scraps of corpse; at the apartment, they cover a whole wall with diagrams and CAT scans and glossy magazine photos of brains—kaiju, human, and lab rat alike—that display negative neurochemical effects from the Drift. In the center, there’s a scan of Hermann’s brain and one of Newt’s, and an injection of blue dye shows identical neural damage, sustained on opposite hemispheres, each one mirroring the other. Below it, Newt has tacked a copy of that paper they published together, ten years ago now, the one that first theorized that kaiju have two brains instead of one, and over the front page of it he’s scrawled in red marker: “OBJECTIVE: PROGNOSIS. HYPOTHESIS: LIFELONG DRFT BLEED????” to which Hermann has added, in a sticky note cramped with his long, looping cursive: “ANTEVERSE CONCURRENT?”

It feels like slipping back into the war days, into those awful old routines that have been all but carved into the bones of him: the long hours, the sleepless nights, the frenzied screaming arguments at 2 a.m. about what technically doesn’t count as unreliable data, man, leave God _out_ of it, and while we’re on the subject which one of us is it with a doctorate in theoretical mathematics, thank you _very_ much, Newton—the difference is that back then he was tormented by his own inability to see the future; now, he can’t seem to _stop_ seeing it, even when he tries to force the visions out, even when he uses all the old tricks, because he’s no stranger to intruders in his head, when all’s said and done. Nothing works. (He hadn’t really thought anything would. Different game, same rules; same brain, same landmines, same loopholes, same jagged bloody edges that sting like a bitch when you poke at them, which of course he does, again and again and again and again and again.) His memory does not even do him the courtesy of blurring out the faces of the damned—every detail of every kaiju attack is burned into the backs of his eyes like a brand, like a red ring, like the mark of fucking Cain, and once he might have been able to say he knew those faces from the military’s endless reels of drone footage but not any longer (is one worse than the other?— _Don’t be a fool, Newton; of course it is_ ) and now—

Now—

The crux of the problem, when you get down to it, is this: he’s got a direct line to the end of the world and it’s exactly as exhilarating as he’s always imagined, only most days it makes him want to puke his fucking guts out.

 

7.

He can’t say when the idea first comes to him, or when it takes hold, or if it’s even his idea in the first place; later, he’ll wonder about that especially, because as far as Newt’s career is concerned there’s never been a real clear line between hostile alien takeover and plain old-fashioned hubris, but the day he knows they’re totally, irrevocably, unforgivably _fucked_ is the day Hermann drops a pile of Pons schematics on his desk and says, “If there is another option, I would very much like to hear about it.”

“We’re kinda backed into a wall here, man,” Newt admits. He pages through the papers Hermann’s given him; they’re good, because they’re Hermann’s, and he’s interested especially to see that the new Pons design appears to have been built to hold three, rather than two, neural interfaces. Newt-Alice-Hermann, Alice-Hermann-Newt, Newt-Hermann-annihilator of mankind, how long has he known they’d end up here? “Hermann?”

“Don’t look at _me_.”

“You cracked first,” Newt reminds him, cheerful, and Hermann glares at him.

“In the event that this endeavor proves deadly—”

“We’re not going to die, Hermann.”

“It’s a possible outcome. More than possible.”

“I survived it twice.”

“Exactly.”

“At least we’ll go out together.”

“Not necessarily,” sniffs Hermann, and then, “You’ll be pleased to know there is a clause in my last will and testament regarding what is to be done with _you_ in the event of my demise. I believe you are to be donated to science.”

“Already have been, baby,” says Newt, and Hermann winces slightly. “There’s something in my will about you, too. They’re gonna turn you into the official PPDC umbrella stand.”

“There are worse fates,” says Hermann dryly, and Newt half-laughs.

“Really,” he says, “we’ll set up a recorder and have it sent directly to Mako. No matter what happens.”

He leans back to watch Hermann turn it over in his mind. He’ll agree, they both know, but it’s a precarious position still, tantamount in Liwen’s eyes to endorsing a rival corporation or leaking Shao tech to the public. _We’ll surely lose our jobs_. But we’ve been saying that for years, Newt reminds him; employment, money, prestige, reputation, none of it’s gonna matter if we’re all dead from the outset. None of it holds up in the face of what’s to come.

“Can we trust them?” says Hermann, eventually, and Newt seizes on the question like a lifeline.

“You realize she probably says the same thing about us,” he says. “It’s not the good old days anymore, Hermann, okay? We all sold out. And if there’s anyone we _can_ trust—”

“It’s Mako,” finishes Hermann. He sighs, runs a hand through his hair in a familiar wartime gesture of exhaustion. Unexpectedly, Newt’s heart aches in response. That’s another thing we should study, he thinks; if I hurt, does he hurt the same way? If I run headfirst into a brick wall, does he get a migraine?

“ _Once_ ,” says Hermann, startling him out of his reverie, and his sharp, piercing gaze makes Newt think he knows more than just the shape of his thoughts. “Once, and if we don’t get the answers we need, we pursue other channels. Agreed?”

“Deal,” says Newt, holding out his hand across the desk, and Hermann reaches to shake it.

 

8.

If the PPDC didn’t want Newt running his mouth in front of large crowds of people they shouldn’t have sent him on a lecture tour spanning six continents, so if you think about it it’s their own goddamn fault, really, that he slipped up so bad, and it’s not like he’d take any of it _back._

The day after the closing of the Breach a live TV broadcast aired in which a visibly unslept and hungover Newt told the world the story of the previous forty-eight hours of his life, filtering nothing, not the clone theory, not the nosebleeds, not the Pons made of trash or the recording he left for Hermann, and by the time he got back to his quarters in the Shatterdome he had dozens of e-mails and voicemails from so-called kaiju priests who’d tracked him down on the internet and wanted to interview him. If it weren’t for Hermann’s biting condescension he might have ignored the messages completely, but as things stood he could never resist a dare—and besides, he was curious; he hadn’t actually had much interaction with that particular subculture during his time with the PPDC, mostly due to the fact that, while often in the media limelight, the Holy Disciples of the Breach possessed little to no actual information regarding the object of their worship.

So he made a stop of his own at the end of the press tour, dragging Hermann with him to San Francisco while Mako and Raleigh did their obligatory photo-op at Oakland’s Oblivion Bay (now a popular tourist destination; Newt’s heard you can get little Trespasser action figure keychains from the info booth, along with informational brochures listing, among other things, the names of the dead). San Fran’s version of Hong Kong’s Bone Slums, the Boneyard, surprised him with its squalor, its lack of the sleek hipster-gentrification that permeated so much of the city—or had, before K-Day; it occurred to Newt then that he hadn’t been to this city since he’d done that octopus research thing here a decade ago, and that yeah, of course, the wealthy weren’t going to stay in their sprawling Russian Hill Victorians and their cutesy bayside resort homes once the ocean turned out to be crawling with three-thousand-ton radioactive fanged killers— _cowards_ , he thought, still thinks; the Boneyard was a dark, dirty neighborhood, its inhabitants seeming to consist largely of people who were either junkies or kaiju cultists or both, and when Hermann hissed, “This seems like your kind of place,” as they passed a group of tattooed young women huddled underneath Trespasser’s tertiary rib, chanting together in low voices and passing around a paper bag, he wasn’t joking so much as observing, cruel as the intention was; and they both knew the truth in it, so clearly that Newt for once didn’t see the point in arguing.

Of course he did it anyway, though, because he’s got _principles_ , and they spent half the walk ragging on each other in what became an argument that devolved very quickly into a shouting match about communism and the black market and culminated in Hermann being screamed at by a man across the street to _shut the fuck up_ after loudly threatening to kneecap Newt with his cane. Newt wondered if he had ever, even once in his life, felt more at peace.

The woman who had contacted them initially was the leader of a group of over four thousand Californians who had been united in their belief, post-Trespasser, that the kaiju were not monsters but gods, gods in the plural, descending on the Earth to punish humanity for its sins. As Newt told the High Priestess—a very tall woman, about Newt and Hermann’s age, whose angular and beautiful face was marked all over with the instantly recognizable electric-blue tattoos of the kaiju priests—as she welcomed them into the dilapidated building where the talk was to be held, “I have no objection to the basic _theory_ of the thing, it’s the theology I tend to have trouble with,” and she led them into an elevator that shrieked and groaned as it jerked laboriously upward, then down a long corridor with the structure’s wood-and-steel skeletons laid bare on either side. “I mean, I just don’t believe in God? I think that’s where you and I differ. Like, I’m not gonna say whether we deserve them or not, you know? I’m not going to make that judgment and I don’t think there’s a God up there making it either. Unless you think the Precursors are divine entities, in which case, hey, no one’s proved they’re _not_. Though I guess that’s subjective, right? Like, who’s to say what’s divine and what’s not? But I can tell you it’s not a moral thing, I mean, they don’t even have the same—”

“Save it for the talk,” muttered Hermann, “which I’m sure will prove even _more_ painful than your usual public-relations posturing.”

“Have I ever disappointed you?” said Newt. “You get to speak too, you know. You were there.”

They had reached a large door with a KEEP OUT sticker on it. The High Priestess, appearing utterly unfazed by both Newt’s rambling and Hermann’s aloofness, adjusted the wide black brim of her hat and said, “The disciples would be blessed to hear from both of humanity’s only kaiju Drift survivors. Dr. Gottlieb, I understand you were able to predict a kaiju event with total accuracy, down to the minute?”

“That’s correct,” said Hermann. “I would be happy to explain the process to your—ah, group.”

At that, the Priestess smiled. “Not a believer either, are you?” she said. “See if we can open your mind a little. Follow me…”

_I like her_ , thought Newt, as they passed through the door, and Hermann glared at him so murderously Newt could feel it burning into the back of his head.

The room the San Francisco branch of the Holy Disciples of the Breach used for its meetings was what appeared to be an entire floor of the building, with all the walls between knocked down and the roof, shockingly, missing—kaiju worshipers liked to congregate in places that had not yet been recovered from the damage wrought by their gods, sometimes even surrounding the ruined buildings with their bodies to prevent reconstruction of what they believed were holy sites. What remained of this building’s fourteenth floor was packed: from wall to wall to wall to wall, people of all ages, ethnicities, and origins stood or leaned on each other or sat on the floor—united, Newt noticed, by their collective propensity toward the color of kaiju blue; a scarf here, a hat there, the occasional tattoo. They had been whispering among themselves, but the room went abruptly quiet as the Priestess entered it with Newt in tow and Hermann a half-step behind. “This is the largest population of disciples in the Western hemisphere,” she explained in a low voice, as they approached the podium. “Our numbers have also stayed fairly high since the closing of the Breach. We had a few deserters, of course, but nothing compared to Hong Kong or San Lucas.”

“Fascinating,” said Hermann. Newt could _feel_ the instinct to reach out and adjust Newt’s skewed tie; he pushed it farther to the left, just to watch Hermann’s jaw clench. “I can’t imagine why one would—”

“Shut up, Hermann,” said Newt, amiably enough, and Hermann was opening his mouth to give a response Newt could have recited from memory when the High Priestess stepped up to the podium and said:

“Holy Disciples, I assume these guests need no introduction. Please welcome Drs. Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb!”

The room was as quiet as a held breath. The Priestess, moving aside, motioned for Newt to take her place; he stepped forward, Hermann mirroring him so that they stood together at the podium. They’d done dozens of these talks together, even dozens of dozens over the previous half-year; neither had a ready explanation for why this one felt _wrong_. They’d had silent audiences before, had even spoken for controversial groups, though none, admittedly, as controversial as this one; maybe it was the wrecked, roofless building that gave their yet-unspoken words the gravity of a prayer.

“Hello, San Francisco,” he said into the mic. “My name is Newt Geiszler, and five months ago, my partner Hermann and I Drifted with a kaiju brain.”

Hermann said, “Our experiment revealed information that proved to be instrumental in the permanent closing of the Breach and subsequent end of the Human-Kaiju War. We’re here to tell you what we saw.”

“ _Traitors_ ,” hissed someone near the front of the crowd, and someone else called out: “We’ll pray for you, doctors!”

“Not necessary,” said Newt, “thanks, though,” and Hermann, ignoring the hecklers, continued with his presentation: “As you all undoubtedly know, the two-pilot Drift system was created in order to protect both pilots from the negative neurochemical and sometimes physical effects of controlling a jaeger alone. In a typical Drift, each pilot represents a hemisphere of the brain—right and left. Drifting with a non-human entity, by the same logic, requires a—”

“Some of us spend our whole lives looking for our gods, and you think you can find Them in a pile of garbage?”

“It wasn’t _technically_ garbage,” Newt began, and a different voice screamed, “They will punish you for your hubris!”

“Hubris!” echoed someone else, and still another voice: “You defied Their plan!”

“Blasphemy!”

“Open the Breach!”

“Pay for your sins!”

“Drifting with a non-human entity,” continued Hermann, as though nothing had happened, “requires a similar partnership. Dr. Geiszler and I were able to Drift with a single secondary kaiju brain as a Drift-compatible pair, which granted us a certain level of immunity from the risks associated—”

“God-killers!”

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Newt, and leaned over to the mic. “Hey, assholes, if we hadn’t done what we did you’d all be dead right now, you understand? We took the risk, and it paid off. Case closed.”

“If you thwart Their plan,” said a voice very near the podium, “They will only come again. Where will you hide, Dr. Geiszler?”

“Something tells me you don’t actually want an answer to that,” he said, drawing a few laughs from the back of the room, “but I’ll tell you this: we’re not gonna hide. We’re not gonna run. If there is a next time—which there won’t be—we’re going to do exactly what we already did for ten goddamn years, which is everything we can to stop them and save your sorry asses!”

“And the next time?” said the same voice. “And the time after that?”

“You heard him,” snapped Hermann. “There’s not going to be a next time. As much as we do hate to disappoint you, the kaiju are not going to come back. The Breach is closed.”

“How do you know they can’t make another one?”

“Because the _structure_ —”

“Fuck’s sake,” said Newt, and motioned toward the source of the voice. “What’s your name?”

“Maura,” said the woman. Newt adjusted his glasses and pinpointed her in the crowd; she stared back, unblinking. She was surprisingly young, with kaiju-blue streaks dyed in her wild hair, a style that reminded him of Mako. “Apprentice Priestess of the Breach.”

Hermann snorted indelicately. Newt said, “So you’re some kind of prophet, is that it?”

“I’ve devoted my life to the kaiju.”

“So’ve I.”

“Not to _murdering_ Them,” she snapped, tipping her chin up at him, defiant. “To loving Them. Accepting Them. Spreading Their gospel to the ignorant among us—”

“And that gospel would be what, exactly?” Hermann broke in. “Exterminating humanity?”

“Punishing us for our sins. _You_ said it.” She pointed at Newt. “We asked for it. We spent decades— _centuries_ destroying the planet, destroying each other, poisoning the ocean, torching everything we could get our hands on, and now it’s coming back to bite us. Literally.” She took a deep breath. “What does all that mean, if not that we’re being punished?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Hermann sharply. “It’s nature. The paper of Dr. Geiszler’s I believe you are referring to states, quite clearly, that the kaiju are nothing more than biological weapons.”

“Or They’re gods! What proof do you have that They aren’t?”

“That’s subjective,” said Newt. “It’s unprovable.”

“You communed with Them directly.”

“And if I saw the face of God—which I deny—it sure as hell didn’t belong to a kaiju. Look—” He unbuttoned his cuffs and began to roll up his sleeves. _Newton_ , Hermann hissed, though whether aloud or not Newt wasn’t sure, and didn’t much care; Leatherback eyed the room from his right arm, and on his left Yamarashi knifed itself in a straight line down the center of the vein. Hermann winced, like he always did when he saw it, but thanks to the Drift Newt knew now it was mostly for show, and his hands moved to his throat, to undo the top button.

“Newton,” Hermann said again, definitely out loud this time, and Newt once again ignored him. His newest tattoo, Otachi’s baby, was exposed now; even Hermann’s eyes were drawn to it, tracing helplessly the line that disappeared down his collar and along his spine. It occurred to Newt then that Hermann had never actually seen his ink in its entirety; the impropriety might kill him, he thought, and resolved to rectify the situation as soon as he could.

His hands moved to the second button. Hermann, trance broken, moved suddenly forward to slap them away. “What are you _doing_ ,” he whispered furiously, leaving off the question mark, “for the love of _God_ , Newton,” and Newt let his hands fall, but stepped forward, closer to the mic.

Hermann fell back, gripping his cane so tightly his fingers began to hurt.

“The truth is,” Newt said, “I do love the kaiju. Before K-Day, I spent a lot of time wondering if my life had a purpose, or what that purpose was. If I’d been put on this Earth just to, I don’t know, collect useless degrees and get published twice a year and make huge advances in the field but get called crazy, or paranoid, or _alarmist_ whenever I tried to do anything that _mattered_ —”

He stopped. The room was totally silent; even Maura said nothing, only watched him. He didn’t need to look at Hermann to know he was equal parts furious and afraid.

“And then Trespasser came. I remember seeing it on the news here in California, and thinking, ‘This is something no one’s ever seen before. This is a biological puzzle even I might not be able to solve.’” He laughed; it sounded high and manic even to his own ears. “I got my first tattoo the same day they took it down. All the artists I went to basically spat in my face. They called me a sociopath. Insensitive. Crazy. They all wanna call me crazy, especially when I’m right. So I gave it to myself. It’s on my leg, right here.” He tapped his right thigh. “I’m not gonna show it to you, though, ‘cause I think if I took my pants off now Hermann would never speak to me again.”

A smattering of laughter.

“By the time Kaiceph hit Mexico, I’d found an artist willing to collaborate with me. She was a veteran ink junkie from Vancouver named Amanda. She became a close friend of mine, and we kept in touch for years. When I told her what I wanted, she said, ‘I get it, man. You gotta love it or let it kill you.’

“She was right. Sometimes that’s all you _can_ do. Amanda stopped speaking to me after her brother was killed by Karloff a couple of years later—she stopped loving them, because she felt like they were killing her. And I understand that. I do.”

Love the apocalypse or be devastated by it, he thought. Love your other half or spend the rest of your life trying to reshape yourself into something that doesn’t need him like you need your next breath of air.

“I guess, if you think about it, I love the kaiju the way you’re supposed to love God. I love them because I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t. If I let the fear of them consume me. And that’s the difference between me and you. You love the kaiju because you’re cynics, you’re misanthropes, you love death and destruction and misery. You take refuge in the idea that it’s all part of some divine plan, that there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them, so we might as well just sit back and let them wipe us out.

“I love the kaiju because it’s the only thing that stops me from doing that. I love them because I believe we have hope for survival, and I believe we have hope for salvation. I love them too much to _let them win_.”

Dimly, he became aware of Hermann’s hand resting on his elbow. The crowd was silent still; Maura regarded him with dark, pensive eyes. The High Priestess, who had been standing a few yards to Hermann’s left throughout their aborted lecture, kept her face very still, saying nothing.

Newt said, “The honest answer, Maura, is that yes, the kaiju will return. The PPDC doesn't want me to say it, but trust me on this. I’ve seen the insides of their heads. I’ve seen their masters; I’ve seen what they can do. I’ve seen how they operate. And the Drift is getting stronger. They’re coming back, and it’s not even a question of when, because the answer is _soon_.

“I don’t know if the jaegers will be able to beat them, this time. I don’t know where the next Breach is gonna be. I don’t even know what form they’ll take. But I can tell you this: when they come for us, I’m not going to be holed up in a condemned building somewhere praying for death. I’m going to be figuring out how to stop them again, and I’ll do that as many times as I have to to keep us safe for good. And if you assholes want to keep pretending there’s no way out of here alive, that’s on you. Just don’t come crying to me when you change your minds and realize it’s too late.”

He realized, as he struggled to catch his breath, that he’d been shouting. Hermann’s grip on his arm tightened, and then disappeared.

Hermann said, “That concludes Dr. Geiszler’s lecture. Any further questions of a scientific nature can be directed to me.”

And there was the silence again, the one that from a crowd this large could mean anything from Newt’s about to get blacklisted from every reputable scientific establishment in the world to he’s finally gonna get that rockstar’s round of applause, and now, later, a year and a half after he actually _did_ get blacklisted, not from every reputable scientific establishment in the world, per se, but from militaries on four continents, plus anyone with a PPDC funding deal and a solid sense of self-preservation—now, thinking about it, flying above it, high off the Drift with all his senses straining outward to some dark massive thing he still can’t quite see beyond the edges of, he’s imagining walking off that stage mid-speech, or not taking the gig at all, or letting Hermann’s hand on his arm restrain him for once, for fucking _once_ , anything to prevent what happened after, but even in his imagination he’s coming up empty. It’s inevitable, maybe, for Newt, this kind of spectacular crashing-and-burning, it’s how he is and it’s how he’s always been, but he has to wish, still, if only for Hermann’s sake, that the Holy Disciples of the Breach, San Francisco branch, had not, of all fucking things, started _praying_.

The pictures that hit the Internet the next morning were damning. “Why couldn’t I have just released a sex tape or something,” groans Newt, “or, I don’t know, confessed to being the Zodiac Killer on my deathbed?”

“Murphy’s Law,” grumbled Hermann, from the hotel bathroom. Newt didn’t know when, exactly, the military PR jackass the PPDC assigned to them decided to start booking doubles instead of just separate hotel rooms; Newt especially didn’t like the way Mako and Raleigh exchanged meaningful looks about it over breakfast. What he did like was being able to annoy Hermann twenty-four hours a day instead of just twelve to fifteen, not that he was ever planning on admitting it.

“I mean, how was I supposed to know somebody was filming it?”

Hermann chose not to dignify this with a response. Newt could see him through the half-open door, combing his hair down across his forehead, and was struck with a sudden tsunami-wave of fondness. “You feel it too, right?” he said. “The Precursors?”

“You know I do,” said Hermann, and then, after a long moment, during which Newt contemplated in silence the saccharine bullshit he was going to have to spew at his next public appearance just to shake off the disaster of this one, continued, only a little grudgingly: “You did the right thing.”

“Can you put that in writing?”

“No.”

“What should I say, then?”

“Tell them you meant what you said. That if the governments of the world don’t begin to put into effect a plan of action for the next invasion, we will be staring down the barrel of humanity’s complete annihilation.”

“That’s good,” said Newt appreciatively. “Back me up?”

Hermann poked his head out from the bathroom. His hair was wet, his shirt half-buttoned, and his glasses balanced precariously on his nose, evidently for practical purposes: in his right hand he held a copy of that morning’s _New York Times_ , on the cover of which Newt Geiszler, world leader in the field of xenobiology and one-time savior of humanity, stood elevated, pointing, grinning, looking somehow more manic than usual before a crowd of people raising their arms up to the open sky and singing what an educated observer might guess to be the kaiju worshipers’ Landfall Hymn.

GEISZLER GUARANTEES KAIJU RETURN, read the headline.

“Of course,” Hermann said.

 

9.

Drifting with Hermann is like being split in half. The pain hits the instant they come out of it—it’s a kind of desperation, this devastated gutshot feeling they both recognize but can’t think fast enough to stave off before it reaches its inevitable conclusion—and it’s hard to tell who moves first but they fuck for the first time in an empty lab with Newt backed up against the wall and everything locked and dark but for the backlighting of Alice’s tank—he turns his face into Hermann’s neck so he doesn’t have to look at Her but Her presence is inescapable, unfettered, as consuming as the lust itself or more so, it’s hard to tell what’s what, Hermann’s rutting up against him and every pulse of Her half-dead formaldehyde brain echoes in their movements, their thoughts, _Newton Newton Newton let me talk to you let me see you let me map you let me in_ and you might be crazy and the fact that _he_ can hear Her too confirms it, or maybe it just means the same thing his presence always did: that if this is the person God sends to watch your back, here, at the end of the world, no one could ever say you didn’t deserve it.

 

10.

Afterwards, they go up to the balcony and share a cigarette. It’s a Newt habit, he realizes, too late, but Hermann’s been hollowed out by cravings for them too, ever since the initial Drift; they pass it back and forth, leaned against the outside wall of the building’s highest floor, looking down on the lights of Hong Kong. From here, Newt thinks he can see the telltale white monuments of the Bone Slums, but it’s late at night, and hard to be sure. Hermann’s shoulder brushes against his, not by accident, and Newt says, into the space where there ought to be silence, “We’re not sending this to Mako, are we?”

“I don’t believe so,” says Hermann. “No.” He leans over to take the cigarette from Newt’s hand and, raising it to his mouth, inhales deeply. Newt waits for him to cough, and steals it back. “We’re not showing that to anyone until they ask.”

“And,” says Newt, “if no one asks?”

Hermann shrugs.

They both know what the answer is; it charges the air with a low, humming electricity. Or maybe that’s just the way Newt’s brain feels normally. He’s having a little trouble remembering what _is_ normal, or was—the world around him—the wind, the sounds of the city below, the distant rumble of an encroaching thunderstorm—seems too quiet and too loud all at once. Instinctively, he leans toward Hermann, aching for the rigidity, the centeredness of him, and Hermann thinks, very clearly, _You cannot honestly believe that I am calm enough to be your port in this storm_ , and Newt says aloud, “Nah, man, it’s not like that,” because it really, really isn’t, Hermann’s a constant but he’s not that kind of constant, and Newt takes it as permission to lay his head on Hermann’s shoulder. “I mean, I don’t think we’re in a storm at all. I think we _are_ the storm.” _Newton, do you ever think_ before _you speak?_ “They always were gonna come for us, Drift or no Drift. The most we can do now is prepare.”

“For the record,” says Hermann, “I think it’s a bad idea.”

“Worse than the drones?”

“They’re still bloody _drones_ , Newton. They’ve just got strings attached.”

“So does Shao, dude. As you’ve patronizingly explained to me about fifteen hundred times in the past two years, any asshole with a trust fund or a government connection can get their hands on Shao tech, it’s not like what we’re doing now is one hundred percent _above board_ —”

“Can you honestly not see the difference?”

“We were always gonna sell ‘em to the highest bidder, Hermann, you knew that when you agreed to it. And is it really possible for the kaiju— _controlled_ kaiju, I’ll add, before you say anything—to do any bigger damage than—”

“If you say _the military industrial complex_ ,” says Hermann coldly, “I will push you off this bloody roof, you arrogant, affected, self-important _ass_. As if you know what that phrase means in the first place.” He’s getting riled up now, which Newt has always enjoyed but likes even more now that he’s privy to the thought processes behind whatever barbs Hermann cares to throw at him, along with this incredibly sexy ice-cold mathematical logic he can’t ever follow without feeling like a rat in a maze, like the minotaur in the labyrinth, like he’s back in the Shatterdome watching jaeger construction from behind a mile of bulletproof glass, understanding on some level what was going on and awed by the vastness, the complexity, the audacity of it, but still closed off from it, still confined to the safety zone, still never allowed past the yellow line, ever since that complaint Hermann filed in Sydney about Newt not having appropriate attire for the renovation sites or whatever bullshit they were on back then—Sydney might’ve been the year of the harassment complaints, actually, now that he thinks about it, because he _distinctly_ remembers Hermann getting chewed out by Pentecost when he tried to go over HR’s collective heads to file a complaint saying Newt rolling up his sleeves in the lab was a form of indecent exposure and therefore a potential sexual harassment liability; Newt had enjoyed the entire thing _immensely_ —“This is exactly the way I always thought you’d kill yourself,” Hermann is saying now, winding down from his argument, tone incisive enough that it jerks Newt back to the present, and the way Hermann’s mouth twists when he looks at him through a thin veil of smoke gives Newt no choice but to reply: “What, saving the world?”

Hermann just laughs at him, lighting another one of Newt’s cigarettes, which—he _has_ to be doing this just to piss Newt off, there’s no way two Drifts give you a craving that fucking strong after you’ve spent a decade lecturing other people about lung cancer and that awful smell permeating into the lab _through the windows_ , Newton, and, alright, looking back on it, he probably should’ve known they’d end up sleeping together, but it was the end of the world, okay, and fighting daily with Hermann kept him saner than medication ever did, it’d been a goddamn lifetime since he’d had that kind of rush, it’s not like he had time to _reflect_ on it or anything, Jesus.

“Hearing you think,” says Hermann, “is like watching a hamster run on its wheel until its paws are bloody, twenty-four hours a day. It doesn’t even stop when you _sleep_. It’s exhausting.”

“Imagine how I feel.”

“Unfortunately,” says Hermann, “I no longer have to,” which carries with it an undertone of something like, I know exactly what you’re thinking and I don’t like it at all, as if that hasn’t been the subtext of every other goddamn thing out of Hermann’s mouth since their _first_ Drift together, as if some unspoken judgment is gonna scare Newt off of saying what he actually does want, very badly, to say.

Or maybe it will. Hermann’s eyes are narrowed. He compromises, bites down a half-formed apology he’s been beating to the back of his throat for months now, and says, “I wish we didn’t end up here.”

“And I wish the Breach had never opened,” says Hermann. “We don’t—”

“Get what we wish for, yeah, I get it,” says Newt. “I just mean—you ever wonder what would’ve happened if we’d met like normal people?”

“No,” Hermann lies. “I have trouble believing you could accomplish anything normally.”

“I could say the same about you, man,” says Newt. “Listen, you know I’m not good with—with feelings, or communication, or _relationships_ , or any of that shit—”

“That’s become very clear to me, yes—”

“But I think I’d have died years ago if it weren’t for you. I’d have gone off the deep end and jumped into the ocean or, I don’t know, cloned a kaiju and gotten us all killed, or had my brain carved out of my skull in an asylum somewhere, or joined that goddamn cult, started tatting up my fucking face, or you’d have found me with Alice, just, you know, totally blacked out, just _bones_ —”

Hermann’s blinking at him, his mind an unreadable mess of mixed signals, and Newt thinks he may actually have rendered him speechless. It’s one thing to _feel_ something, he thinks in a sudden moment of clarity, it’s another to actually _say_ it, which is the most obvious thing in the world, it’s Human Interaction 101, but somehow he never really got it, never got it like he’s getting it now, how you can love someone with every cell, every twisted DNA strand, every sparked-out synapse in your body and still want to slap them upside the head at least once every hour, how you can hate someone with all of that and more and still know without a shadow of a doubt that you’d go crazy, you’d go crazier without his hand on your arm and his mind vying for space against yours, because that’s all it’s about, isn’t it, that’s all it’s ever been about, that line of tape down the middle of the lab and the entrails thrown over it, and after all these years he still doesn’t know if they’re a peace offering or a warning shot, if having two brains instead of one is a death sentence or an evolutionary advantage, if the kaiju or the jaeger came first—and Hermann kisses him on the mouth, long and rough, and Newt’s hands find the lapels of his ridiculous coat, and they don’t leave the balcony for a long, long time.

 

11.

“I hate to turn the tables on you, man, but I think you’re being paranoid,” says Newt, lying through his teeth on both counts, the night Hermann figures out they’re being followed. They’re out to dinner at a restaurant—a real one, with tablecloths and waiters and water served in crystal; they’ve just finished the first working prototype drone-piloted jaeger in the world, and Newt, in a rare act of sentimental extravagance, has asked Hermann to accompany him in a celebration. He looks around the restaurant now, sees about a dozen well-dressed gentlemen who could very well have been in Shao’s employ or, frankly, the PPDC’s, and says, “Are you sure it’s not just paparazzi? We’re rock stars now, you know.”

Hermann contemplates his red wine like he’s considering throwing it across the table, just for the pleasure of seeing it stain Newt’s shirt he ironed specially for the occasion, but settles for a familiar bitchy glare. Newt fights a smile. “If that’s what you need to believe,” he says loftily. “I, however, would like to face the facts, which are, in order of importance—one, we are being followed; two, Liwen is having us followed; three, Liwen doesn’t trust us; four—”

“It’s all my fault?” Newt says, correctly reading the trajectory of Hermann’s thoughts. “Fuck off, Hermann.”

“You antagonize her,” Hermann points out. “You behave childishly. Alice, for instance.”

“She needed a name.”

“I am not going to dignify that with an answer.”

“You think she’s keeping tabs on us because I try to brighten up our workplace a little? Come on, Hermann. If it really is Shao—”

“It is—”

“—Then she’s having us followed because once our prototype gets approved, we’re going to be handling billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment! She needs to vet us one more time in case we, like, embezzle and tank her company. Besides—” He lowers his voice, and reaches across the table, realizing, just in time to stop it, that he’s going to put his hand over Hermann’s. He pulls his arm back. Hermann raises an eyebrow—entirely too smug, Newt thinks, for this early in the evening. “We _have_ been acting weird, Herms. You’ve gotta admit that. We go home together, we come in together, we stay late—we don’t even have lab techs anymore because we’re shitty bosses, but you see how it looks like we’re hiding something, and _you_ don’t socialize, because you hate people, which leaves me to pick up the slack as far as _redeeming our reputation_ goes, and believe me, that’s not going great, did I tell you about what happened with that dude from the board of bioethics—”

“You clashed with an ethicist,” says Hermann drily. “I’m _shocked_.”

“I clashed with a _bioethicist_ ,” says Newt, “and he was kind of an asshole anyway, you would’ve clashed with him too. Point is, it’s not a fireable offense to be weird. We’re not stealing from her, and we’re not selling company secrets, so we have nothing to be afraid of.” He takes a bite of his noodles and gestures at Hermann to do the same, receiving a chilling stare for his trouble. He hopes whatever level of ghost-Drifting Hermann’s at right now isn’t close enough to feel the lack of confidence behind his reassurances.

“I suppose not,” says Hermann grudgingly. “I still don’t like it.”

“It’d be weird if you did,” Newt tells him. “Come on, we have the night off. Enjoy it. They’ll probably just think we’re having an affair.”

“That would be worse for my reputation than embezzlement.”

“Jackass,” says Newt cheerfully. “Eat so we can get out of here. Shao spies or no Shao spies, this place makes me nervous,” and not for the first time he curses the Drift and everything it’s brought with it, because if there’s one thing that drives Hermann absolutely up the fucking wall it’s being _watched_ , and Newt’s known this for years but hasn’t ever quite felt the full extent of it until now, sitting in the restaurant, with Hermann’s anxiety clawing at him on a literally _psychic_ level—he knows Hermann wants to leave, and Hermann knows he knows, which is so profoundly mortifying to him that Newt now knows they’ll be sitting at this table for another hour on principle.

Newt’s pretty sure all these things were happening _before_ the Drift, actually. It’s just that now it’s all proven, spelled out via biological phenomenon so real and so tangible you can read it right off a computer screen. Before, few things were private between them, because they knew each other well enough to know when the other was lying, and would leverage the information accordingly; now, nothing is private between them because seventeen months ago their brainwaves had flickered, sputtered, and merged on a LOCCENT database screen, aligning so tightly that it looked for a moment as though one of them had disappeared.

“Hey,” says Newt, “do you think you could, like, erase someone’s brain by Drifting too many times? Hypothetically? Like, do we know the record?”

“Three hundred and eighteen,” says Hermann, “including simulations, and, hypothetically, that’s not possible. If it were, I doubt I would have taken the risk of doing so with _you_.”

“I mean, could someone—lose their individuality from excessive Drifting?”

Hermann’s eye glints. “That would depend on your definition of individuality.”

They spend the better part of an hour arguing about what does or does not constitute actual artificial intelligence, the guy two tables down hasn’t moved an inch since they got here, Hermann’s eye starts twitching the minute he feels Newt start to notice—and through all of this the ghost of the brain they’ve shared hovers between them, staining every word and gesture the color of kaiju blue.

 

12.

The first time the world ended, Newt was twenty-five years old. He had six advanced degrees, twenty major publication credits, a professorship at MIT, and a reputation for being brilliant, hardworking, a great teacher—but also eccentric, abrasive, and nearly impossible to work with in any kind of professional capacity.

He spent a lot of time alone, but when hadn’t he? It didn’t bother him. Being alone meant you had the time and energy to focus on your work.

His degrees were all in biology. His latest one, a PhD in marine bio he’d earned while teaching at MIT and writing a series of utterly unrecordable rock songs about fighting the capitalist machine while the other tenants in his apartment building slammed their fists against the wall and threatened to file noise complaints, had focused on the unique brain neurology of the Pacific octopus. His advisor, who’d also been the advisor for his last PhD in neurology and a master’s in entomology, had told him two things: one, to go to California, and study the octopus in its natural habitat; and two, to actually _commit to this_ , Newton, find one thing and stick to it, you’re not getting any younger here, to which Newt replied: _Neither are you_ , which, as it turns out, is not a thing you want to be heard saying to the head of the biological sciences department at the university that’s graciously allowed you to take up its precious time and funding with what is, to all intents and purposes, a quarter-life crisis.

“I’ve been having this crisis since I was thirteen years old,” Newt snaps back. “What’s your excuse?”

So he goes to California. It’s made very clear to him that if he doesn’t get his act together this is the last thing the university will ever pay for, so—Newt translates—he’d better find some fucking mindblowing octopus data. That, or discover the cure for cancer.

The beginning of the end of the world found him in a tiny rented lab in San Francisco, surrounded by tanks full of cephalopods and praying for a miracle. When Trespasser set a claw down in the Mission, he felt the earth move, and thought: _Oh God_ , thought, _Here comes the big one_ , thought _I’ve done this, I’ve killed us all_ , but he was an atheist, damn it, even the God he’d been raised with hadn’t left him much of a choice, and he ducked under his desk with one hand over his eyes and the other on his pulse until the rumbling passed, and when he stuck his head out the door to find his own neighborhood one of the few to have escaped virtually unharmed he thought, _What are the chances?_

“Hell of an earthquake, huh?” he called to his neighbor, an elderly woman named Mrs. Taki who lived in the building across the street and sometimes sweet-talked Newt into watering her plants while she was out, and she shook her head at him, her eyes wide.

“It was a monster from the sea,” she said. “My cousin up by the wharf, he saw it. Crashed through the bridge, like _that_.” She made a snapping motion with her hands. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“You mean,” said Newt, “like a kaiju?”

“Yes,” she said. “A kaiju.”

“Only in movies,” he said.

“Well,” said Mrs. Taki, “go look at it. It’s going to kill us all.”

“Sure it is,” said Newt, and she heard the placation in his tone, and glared at him.

“Turn on the news,” she said. “You’ll see.”

He did turn on the news, and he did see. Switched through channel after channel, wondering if this was some kind of sick practical joke, but it was the same everywhere. _Unidentified creature emerges from the Pacific Ocean, sixty-seven reported fatalities so far, seventy, a hundred, two hundred._ Newt paced the lab, ignoring his octopi, ignoring frantic phone calls from his father in Berlin, less-frantic ones from his colleagues in Boston, and tried to put his thoughts in order. He wanted to ask Mrs. Taki if her cousin had mentioned anything about the creature’s gait, such as whether it moved like a biped or a quadruped or something else altogether.

Six months, two kaiju, a notice of termination of employment, and several hundred inconclusive survivor interviews later, Newt caught wind of the jaeger project. The man behind it, he read, was a mathematician and former child prodigy from TU Berlin. He found the guy’s contact info online, along with his picture: tall, thin, unsmiling, formally dressed, and carrying a cane, with a jawline like a slap on the wrist.

_Dear Hermann Gottlieb_ , read the first letter, _My name is Dr. Newton Geiszler, but you can call me Newt. Only my mother calls me doctor._

 

13.

Two years after the closing of the Breach, they complete the first draft of a book called _The Copilot Connection: A Definitive Study of the Neurochemical Effects of Repeated or Sustained Drifting,_ title courtesy of Hermann’s distaste for pop-science and sensationalism; Newt had wanted to market it as a memoir, call it _Prophets of the Apocalypse,_ but in the end Hermann had won and the truth was Newt hadn’t fought his side all too hard to begin with. Hermann’s particular brand of—not misanthropy, exactly, but of keeping the world at cane’s length, of making himself impossible and unpalatable and buttoned-up past the collarbone even as everything around him heated itself to breaking point—had been appealing to Newt more and more with every interview, every public appearance where he was asked to roll up his sleeves and put on display the desperation carved into his skin. No, he wanted to say, still wants to say; _enough_ , the war is over, things are different now, I swear it, it’s gonna be different this time—but when they ask him if the world is ending he says yes, and when they ask him what he’s going to do about it he shills for Shao’s drone project, alone in doing so only to spare Hermann from having to stomach it.

He still enjoys the fame, of course, but he’d be lying if he said there wasn’t a voice in the back of his head—a voice that sounds a lot like Hermann’s, though whether it’s Drift bleed or just Newt’s sorry British-accented excuse for an intuition he doesn’t know—saying, _You can’t go on like this forever, you can’t go on like this forever_ , and in response he smiles with all his teeth, follows the PR scripts Liwen gives him but only closely enough to stay on the edge of her good graces, keeps wearing leather jackets and rumpled oxfords and sunglasses to cover the bad eye, and spends too much money on the smoking habit he picked up back when it was the end of the world and nothing mattered very much at all.

 

14.

The projected timeline for Shao’s jaeger drones is marketable success in ten years.

Newt and Hermann do it in four.

It goes like this:

Hermann’s jaegers were only meant to hold one pilot, only built to accommodate the workings of one lone soldier’s mind. Why? Because Hermann’s a cynic at heart; because he’s a misanthrope; because his faith in the ineffable strength of human connection ends where the twentieth century begins; because all the way up until the moment he went into the Drift himself and came back out the other side with a nightmare screaming in his brain and bile rising in his throat but still, somehow, miraculously, alive, Hermann could never even _conceive_ of a thing that required two coordinated halves to function as a cohesive whole.

But when Lightcap’s Drift tech designs hit the market, it was Newt who remembered in exactly _whose_ image the jaegers were built, and it was Hermann who talked him through the logic and the proving of it. Hermann who asked him to come to the City of Angels and prove it with him.

There’s an awful kind of symmetry to this. The closed-off feedback loop of their life, the endless call-and-response of it, only ever becomes dangerous when it’s let alone for too long, or when something dangerous has been absorbed into it, which Liwen Shao clearly didn’t know when she let them into her little Frankenstein’s lab but the Precursors _do_ , because, look, Newt’s a long-avowed atheist and Hermann’s God is a cold one but they’ve finally found the key to the Day of Judgment, and Hermann codes circles around it while Newt puts it under a microscope and draws a straight line with a scalpel from throat to gut. All metaphorical, of course; sometimes Newt seems to think, subconsciously (and nothing is subconscious, not anymore—whatever it is in his own mind Newt’s afraid to look at because it growls and makes bumps in the night Hermann will excavate for him, and whatever Hermann represses Newt will be more than happy to drag into the light, though, as in the case of both parties, he reserves the right to be an unequivocal dick about it) that if he presses his forehead hard enough against Hermann’s, their brains will physically attach, perhaps via a thin, string-like membrane unique to the biology of fully developed kaiju, which, like human jaeger pilots, require only a very minimal neurological bridge to coordinate the pathways of their primary and secondary brains. 

Sometimes Newt wonders what would happen if Alice killed them both, which they both know She could do very quickly, and as easily as knocking down a building, as efficiently as breaking through a wall. Would their bodies dissolve, self-destruct like bombs or kaiju or letters in old spy movies, there on the floor of the Shao Industries first-floor laboratory? Would there be a radioactive emergency state declared on the ground beneath? Would scientists chop them to pieces, side by side on some sick morgue’s operating table, and find pieces of identical DNA, declare them mutants, monsters, cloning experiments gone horribly wrong? Would some jackass biologist with a death wish Drift with whatever was left of his brain and see things that would eventually drive him mad?

At the summit, they explain, briefly: “To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own.” It’s an old tagline; Hermann makes it sound ancient. He explains that jaegers, intentionally or not, mirror, both in function and design, the body of the kaiju. That a weapon with two minds can only be defeated using a weapon with two minds. That—and this is where Newt interjects—to know thine enemy, as intimately as one knows oneself, is the single greatest weapon a soldier in any war can have.

He keeps his sleeves rolled down, as per Hermann’s request-slash-insistence, but still there’s some murmuring in the audience. An older Japanese guy with a whole lot of ribbons on his lapel is saying something to Mako in undertone. She’s nodding gravely. Newt notices she’s cut her hair much shorter than it was the last time he saw her; the red streak she got to commemorate the Battle of the Breach is no longer visible, and the set of her face has lost some of the youthful determination he remembers from the war years. She hasn’t made eye contact with him once.

“Statistically,” says Hermann, “removing the possibility of human error altogether makes victory over another wave of kaiju attacks more probable.”

“When they come back,” says Newt, “they’ll have adapted to our defenses. Because they’ve Drifted with Dr. Gottlieb and I, they understand not just the experience of the two-pilot system but the actual science of it. They’re going to find some way to take advantage of that. We have to be one step ahead of the technology they already know.”

Hermann shows them a diagram: it’s a jaeger operating system designed under the principles of drone warfare. Each jaeger is meant to sync with hundreds, maybe thousands of others, and to descend on their prey like so many kaiju, with some lucky government buyer at the controls. (There was a time, Newt thinks vaguely, when just the idea of this would have made him physically sick.) He points out the left and right “hemispheres,” or the two separate programs that have been merged together in the shape of a jaeger to create one massive drone. The “left side,” he explains, is an operating system for the jaeger’s defensive actions; the “right side” will be the offensive. This functions effectively as a safeguard against self-destructive actions, i.e. jaegers walking deliberately into ambushes while under simple attack orders, or getting frightened and flinching back at crucial moments. He shows the room a photo of their very first fully operational model, thanks them for their time, and sits down.

The drones are approved almost unanimously.

Afterwards, as they’re leaving, Mako corners them by the door. A Shao security guard moves to stop her; Newt waves him off. Up close, her face is marked deep with the kind of exhaustion he can only ever associate with Hong Kong, with the end of all things, with working and working and fighting and working to ward off the feeling of despair that otherwise would settle on you like fever. The memory stirs something in him; he reaches out to her, a brief, aborted gesture, and lets his hand fall.

“Mako,” says Hermann, in a pained voice, and she interrupts him by taking hold of Newt’s arm.

“That was a lovely speech,” she says, her fingers digging into the soft flesh of Yamarashi’s face. “Did you write it yourself?”

“Yes,” says Newt. “Hermann helped.”

She regards him for a moment.

“Take off your sunglasses.”

“No.”

“Take them _off_ ,” she says, and reaches for his face, but Hermann, lightning-quick, grabs her wrist before she can touch him.

Every sound or movement in the room stops in its tracks, staring at the three of them frozen in their strange little tableau: Hermann’s hand on Mako’s wrist, Mako’s hand an inch from Newt’s face, Newt’s own arms crossed in front of him—had he known that Hermann would move that quickly? he asks himself, but of course the answer is yes; Hermann, he’s learned, is a man of surprising agility and strength, and with a vested interest in keeping the whites of both their eyes hidden.

The night before he had taken out his own contacts before he pinned Newt to a wall, dislodging several blue-tinted MRI scans and a blurry candid photo of the PPDC’s new head of research. They’d been leaving the lights on lately, not that it helped; the ring around his eye had glittered a bright, unnerving red, and Newt didn’t have to look in a mirror to see that it matched his own exactly.

He could be keeping track of his own heartbeat, in this silence.

Mako draws back, and slowly the room comes to life again. A few people are still eyeing Newt and Hermann like they’re figuring out which one of them they’d need to run from first.

“Are you angry,” Mako says, “that I voted against it?”

“No,” says Newt, and as he says it finds that it’s true. “I’m glad you did.”

“You haven’t lost all your sense, then.”

“Never had it to begin with.”

“I disagree,” she says, but then her security team’s coming to take her back to Moyulan, and she’s nodding at them as she turns to leave the room, her expression gone cold and professional again, and Hermann’s shoulder brushes his as a helicopter roars lowly to life on the roof above.

 

15. 

As per fucking usual, Newt doesn’t see the big picture until it’s too late.

On Hermann’s count— _fuck_ , Newt thinks, when they get to zero, consumed suddenly by an emotion that feels too powerful to call _human_ , or anything at all; _you always were my favorite doomsday countdown._

_Focus,_ says Hermann’s voice, and then: EXTERMINATE.

For one long, burning second, that word is the only thing he knows, and the only desire he has. EXTERMINATE, he echoes, this time hearing his own voice. NOW, and then it’s all happening very quickly, his brain a rush of sensation like nothing he’s ever felt before, and that’s coming from _him_ , Jesus, it’s like taking a shot of caffeine directly to the vein and it’s like kissing Hermann, fast and dirty, it’s like going off your meds for the first time in years and crashing hard, like having a gun to your head, like giving yourself electric shocks because you’re the only lab rat humanity’s got left, like all of those familiar things and then a million unfamiliar ones, and things that _should_ be unfamiliar but aren’t, like special glands under your tongue filling with toxic acid or a millennia worth of failed civilization spreading itself like a web over the bare surface of your mind, like guilt that crushes, that gathers, that scars. Like a memory that bleeds into prophecy and back again.

The hivemind is stirring.

Through a very thick fog, he can see that Hermann has collapsed, blood pouring from his nose. There are people crouched around him, shaking him, asking questions, taking out their phones to call for help. No one notices the trembling of the ground beneath.

Newt’s body is on its knees. Someone tells him not to worry, that Hermann will be fine. Someone else asks him how often this happens, and Newt’s voice says, “Every once in a while,” to which Liwen, who is standing, stock-still, watching the proceedings in silence, responds, “Why didn’t you tell me he was in such poor health?”

The hivemind is waking. EXTERMINATE, says Hermann’s voice again, and Newt echoes it back to him, blissfully content to be back in the loop, to be the answer to Hermann’s not-question, the response to his call. EXTERMINATE.

“I didn’t think it was any of your business,” snaps Newt, half himself and half not, feeling his mouth work but thinking of other things entirely, and he’s flying high enough that he doesn’t feel regret, or the sting of the look she gives him when she says, “You are my employees. Anything that may impede the progress of your work—”

“ _Does it look like progress is being impeded_ —”

Hold it together now hold it together just a few more seconds just a few more just one more just a—

EXTERMINATE, comes the order again, very loud now, and punctuated by the sharp sound of a cane rapping against a chalkboard.

Newt falls.

 

16.

He wakes to find Hermann sitting, fully dressed, at the foot of the bed, and he’s barely registered the oddity of it when Hermann starts talking:

“What is the last thing you remember?”

Newt fumbles for his glasses, only to find that they’ve been broken into three uneven pieces. He glares at Hermann, even though he knows it isn’t his fault; he has a vague, uneasy memory of faceplanting on the floor of the Shao Industries boardroom, which he supposes must be the cause. “Were you just sitting here watching me sleep? You could’ve just woken me up, man.”

“You wouldn’t _wake_ up,” snaps Hermann. “I tried everything. I thought you were catatonic. Answer the question.”

“The last thing I remember,” says Newt, “is Mako getting in the helicopter.”

“Wrong answer.”

“Winning the vote.”

“No.”

“Giving our presentation?”

“Newton—”

“We killed it, by the way.”

“The presentation.”

“The test run.”

“ _Shit_ ,” says Hermann, and Newt’s spent a decade and a half looking forward to the day he’d hear Hermann swear for the first time but now that it’s happened he sort of hates it, wants to tell Hermann to take it back, to say something stuffy and British and frustratingly eloquent instead. In the end he leans his head back on the pillow and says nothing, lets Hermann watch him with sharp, tracking eyes. He feels like a fly stuck in amber for its third consecutive ice age, like a skydiver who’s just realized his parachute strings are cut. Like that ambulance driver who swam out from under the Golden Gate, still years away from being immortalized in stone.

Hermann’s face softens, so minutely it’s almost imperceptible. Newt feels a cool rush of relief. He wants to reach for Hermann’s hand.

Hermann says, “Mako Mori is dead."

 

17.

When he’s done puking, Hermann hands him a handkerchief and says, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but we’ve been manipulated. That much is clear.”

“Don’t gloat,” says Newt, ragged, “it’s my fault, it’s my fault, oh God, it’s my fucking fault,” and he’s retching again, bringing up bile, and Hermann lays a hand on his back to steady him. He doesn’t know what he wants Hermann to say—that it’s _not_ his fault? That they can fix it? That everything’s going to be okay? Newt remembers distinctly the interviews Hermann used to give, back at the very beginning of the war, with the whole world scared shitless and reporters practically knocking down the doors of anyone who knew anything about the kaiju or the Breach or the upcoming U.N. summit, and Hermann, whose half-finished jaeger designs hadn’t been leaked yet, said things like, “I cannot guarantee anything,” and, “There is at present no sure way to predict when and where the next attack will occur,” and, “The chances of our species’ continued survival in the face of such an enormous and unknowable threat are nearly nonexistent, but not entirely so.” His first letter: _There are no guarantees in this life_ , Hermann had written; _only sheer determination and the human will to survive. And even those we cannot know for certain, unless we are by some measure forced to deny them._ Now, kneeling by the toilet in the apartment he and Hermann share, he thinks, I love you, as simple as that, three words, short words, no pretension, no ulterior motive, _I love you_ , and shoring up against his ribcage he feels Hermann’s heart break, just a little.

“We have to stop Drifting,” he says eventually. “Obviously.”

He doesn’t miss the knee-jerk response that moves through both their bodies—it’s chilling, the idea of living outside of the Drift, outside of Hermann. Of never being able to touch his mind again, except through the complicated and necessary osmosis other people called a noise complaint liability.

“The withdrawal symptoms,” says Hermann slowly, “will be painful.”

“We’ve survived worse.”

He can feel Hermann wanting to correct him— _I’ve_ survived; what you feel is merely an _impression_ —and then decide against it, leaning heavily against the adjacent wall. He says, “It scarcely seems important now, but do you remember the Marshall’s son?”  
  
Newt frowns. “I never met him. The one who got kicked out of the Academy?”

“Jacob Pentecost,” says Hermann. “He’s coming back for—for Mako’s funeral.”  
  
“He won’t know what really happened.”

“According to a recent press release, he’s planning on re-entering the jaeger program.”

“Also not our problem,” says Newt, but his heart is thudding hard, and he feels acid rising in his throat again. He fights it back, fixing his eyes on Hermann’s. “We’ve got—we don’t have anything to be afraid of.”

“For once,” says Hermann, “I hope you’re right.”  
  
Newt stands, stumbling into Hermann as he does so. Hermann catches him with a hand on his elbow, and Newt thinks about steadying himself but leans into Hermann instead, pressing his face into Hermann’s neck, a small, pathetic gesture of comfort. “Don’t get vomit on me,” says Hermann, but doesn’t put any bite into it. His hand rests on Newt’s back, gentler than it’s ever been.

Newt says, “What did you hear? In the Drift?”

“You mean when they were—”

“Yes.”

There’s a long pause, and then Hermann says, “I heard the voices of all the people we couldn’t save.” His tone turns bitter. “All the good we thought we were doing. I heard people—women, children, innocent people, crying out for help. Everyone killed by a kaiju in the war. Saying if I didn’t unleash the jaegers, they would die, and it would be our fault.”

He turns his face so that his cheek is resting against Newt’s hair. He says, “Why? What did you hear?”

“Your voice.” He laughs a little, but it sounds like a sob, and he gives it maybe another eight seconds before he breaks down completely. He wants to take his younger self by the shoulders and shake him until he learns how to love normally, to love well, to love without leaving apocalypse in his wake. To love outside of this smoking trainwreck he’s made of himself, of his life. Of the world. “That’s all I ever heard. Just your voice.”

 

  


End file.
